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Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#71

Post by collyw »

mabbo wrote: post #61
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This model isn't "serverless", it's PAAS. It's not much of a future. Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale. (Edit: Doesn't mean it can't be more popular though - the web is full of prototypes) "Serverless" as in AWS Lambda has very specific use cases. The people who are serving websites on Lambda or something are not only doing it wrong, they are wasting money while locking themselves in to an architecture that…

Consider the problems that both Lambda and Containers/PaaS solve for you: ignoring infrastructure. It's there, sure, but I don't care much about it. Now take that idea to the absolute extreme. I write code, I push it into the cloudy-cloud machine, and it's serving clients immediately.

As someone that knows how to set up a server, I found Heroku a lot more difficult to get a Django app running than on a "normal" server. And a lot more of a PITA to debug.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#72

Post by fermuch »

pauljaworski wrote: post #7

When I started building out the back-end of my latest project, I realized its only purpose was to persist data to a NoSQL database. I had a small epiphany and decided I didn't need to build a server at all - I could just use something like Firebase to accomplish that task. Now that I'm getting deeper into the project, I need to add in features like PDF generation. No problem! I'll use microservices for that. Well, th…

An easier approach IMO would be to create an amazon lambda script to process the pdf and make it run when you upload a file to a bucket in amazon s3.

It's easy to do and you don't need to mess with anything more than two simple API.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#73

Post by caseymarquis »

grosbisou wrote: post #45
caseymarquis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like your framework sucks. With an orm and some sort of json serialization that's literally just: Put bagel in toaster. Update the db model. Add a migration. Update the viewmodel db model translation in relevant requests. Get bagel and butter it. Commit. Test the migration on a staging db if feeling paranoid, cause it's just adding a column. Push to master. Update production. Take last bite of bagel. If you ar…

> cause it's just adding a column This kind of mentality is why most applications are shit and broken. And why most hires are worthless. And everyone is not working on a cookie cutter over-bloated rails website. Sorry but this kind of remark simplifying our job always pisses me off.

At my company, we have one software package it costs on average a quarter million USD to install per enterprise customer. It gets about 100,000 records added per day in some deployments. We test our migrations on those systems and have a dedicated data service which is the only thing which can touch any given customer database. We are paranoid about those systems.

We also have throwaway apps like an internal time clock system which monitors when people show up based on their cell MAC.

Latter case: Adding a checkbox is easy.

Former case: Adding a checkbox is easy but we have to test it first.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#74

Post by ninjakeyboard »

This is totally dependent on the domain. If you're working in digital video, for example, much of the work is moving away from the client toward server side solutions. I don't think you can make any sweeping generalizations - there are just more options that suit different needs. The need to scale is an increasingly important and popular topic and that won't go away any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#75

Post by gwbas1c »

brianwawok wrote: post #54
jbb555 wrote: post #5

WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.

The financial exchanges running in Java would like to disagree with your gross generalization.

Yes, but: These a highly-tuned code that starts infrequently and doesn't use GC. VMs still have a startup cost; although one could argue that it's something that can be optimized out if there's enough desire.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#76

Post by hedwall »

mabbo wrote: post #61
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This model isn't "serverless", it's PAAS. It's not much of a future. Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale. (Edit: Doesn't mean it can't be more popular though - the web is full of prototypes) "Serverless" as in AWS Lambda has very specific use cases. The people who are serving websites on Lambda or something are not only doing it wrong, they are wasting money while locking themselves in to an architecture that…

Consider the problems that both Lambda and Containers/PaaS solve for you: ignoring infrastructure. It's there, sure, but I don't care much about it. Now take that idea to the absolute extreme. I write code, I push it into the cloudy-cloud machine, and it's serving clients immediately.

So, like Elastic Beanstalk or Heroku ?

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#77

Post by tachion »

mabbo wrote: post #67
tachion wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the fact that developers are expensive has in common with infrastructure/ops? You mean that developers shouldn't be working on it? I couldn't agree more, just like I wouldn't like my dentist being my heart surgeon! Developers should write the code, but they should not be doing infrastructure nor operations, and they should not enforce some 'serverless' utopia on projects/situations where pure infrastructure…

Depends on where you work. If you're a three-nan start up, you don't have an infrastructure or ops team. You do everything. As well, companies who have dedicated infrastructure teams are wasting money when we reach a world where that problem is purely automated. And that's where I think we're going.

Sure, sometimes you cant have it all, but in my experience (and hey, I am aware that I'm biased here!) I've seen ops engineers being better at programming than developers at doing ops. Another reason why I'd prefer to have 2 devels and 1 ops person is that that single ops person can bring to the table entirely different experience and point of view and that's a pure added value here.

If you think that infra teams is wasting money, then I'd say its the same case of 'serverless utopia' - when you're using 'purely automated serverless' platform you're paying way more money, because, hey, someone has to build that infrastructure and it isnt magic, its people, ops people. So what you're doing here is simply changing money buckets labels in your head and you have to now deal with a product that's tailored for everyone, instead of you specifically.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#78

Post by chii »

fermuch wrote: post #68
Keats wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link looks it's S3 doing the hosting and a lambda function only for contact forms, not hosting the blog on Lambda.

You're still paying only a few cents.

If you could host via s3, why not use GitHub.io and do it for free?

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#79

Post by collyw »

tachion wrote: post #55
mabbo wrote: post #21

Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…

What does the fact that developers are expensive has in common with infrastructure/ops? You mean that developers shouldn't be working on it? I couldn't agree more, just like I wouldn't like my dentist being my heart surgeon! Developers should write the code, but they should not be doing infrastructure nor operations, and they should not enforce some 'serverless' utopia on projects/situations where pure infrastructure…

Why shouldn't we? I can do all of that. I can write better code than the the writers of the last two applications I have inherited (admittedly my sysdamin skills are probably less than a full time sysadmin, but good enough).

I guess following your analogy. If you only had a dentist and a salesperson available to do your heart surgery, who would you choose?

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#80

Post by collyw »

obihill wrote: post #47
mabbo wrote: post #21

Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…

I agree in principle with most of what you've said here. The server-side is going to be a lot more intelligent in the near future though. My prediction is that every cloud provider is going to have some sort of AWS Lambda service that will eventually become like a server-less toolkit in the cloud. And these platforms could eventually have some augmented intelligence built-in. Essentially, we can't keep teaching each…

Come one, people still stick with PHP because anything else is too difficult to set up on a server. Its been like that for years already.
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